Private emails show aides caught utterly off guard by the controversy they sparked. One reason why: No one seemed to have gotten direction from a lawyer.
When the State Department published a glowing profile of President Donald Trump’s “winter White House” at Mar-a-Lago in April, they thought it would be a mundane bit of content that might attract a few foreign readers to U.S. embassy websites. Instead, staff found themselves embroiled in a heated controversy over the use of government resources to promote the president’s private business interests, according to a review of internal emails.
The post from ShareAmerica, a news and information division of the State Department, provided a brief history of the Mar-a-Lago property and noted Trump’s use of his club early in his presidency to host high-level meetings with foreign leaders.
“By visiting this ‘winter White House,’ Trump is belatedly fulfilling the dream of Mar-a-Lago’s original owner and designer,” the post read.
It took nearly three weeks for the post to gain much attention. But when it did, the backlash was swift. In late April, a reporter at the State Department press briefing asked why the department was using government resources to promote the president’s business. The story quickly picked up steam, and ShareAmerica staffers, initially tickled that their work was getting far more attention than usual, quickly realized that it was ballooning into a larger, more serious, controversy.
“It is my genuine concern this situation over the Mar-a-Lago story is going to mushroom beyond any reason and innocent people are going to be hurt,” wrote one ShareAmerica staffer as coverage of the Mar-a-Lago post intensified.
The initial theory surrounding the origins of the post was that it was done at the behest of someone close to the president as a means of advertising his crown-jewel property. But internal emails and talking points obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request don’t provide evidence of that. Instead, they show that ShareAmerica did not receive any direction from the White House or guidance from ethics lawyers before the post went live. Indeed, staff didn’t seem to consider questions about the ethicality of the post at all.
The resulting uproar shows the potential pitfalls for an administration led by a career businessman who has refused to fully divest himself of private endeavors that could benefit from his government service.
Trump charges members of his Mar-a-Lago club hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, and financial records show that his income from the club—which hiked its member dues by $50,000 this year—more than doubled from 2014 to 2016.. Trump has placed his business entities into a trust, which his two adult sons oversee. But conflict of interest questions continue to dog his presidency.
“President Trump’s refusal to divest from his business empire creates endless possible conflicts of interest, and unless agencies take steps to stop the president from profiting from his position, this type of thing is going to happen again,” said Melanie Sloan, a senior advisor to the group American Oversight, which obtained the internal records via a FOIA request, in a statement to The Daily Beast.
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Internal emails from the State Dept unit that promoted Mar-a-Lago on its website show utter confusion and panic as the media firestorm unfolded https://t.co/vJgVV1ChFY
— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) December 11, 2017
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